Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

November 01, 2011

There has been a steady stream of headlines recently about the use of Western surveillance technology by repressive regimes. After the hacktivist group Telecomixexposed the use by Syria of filtering and surveillance devices manufactured by the California-based company Blue Coat last month, the company has finally acknowledged that at least thirteen of its devices are being used by Syria.

Today, The Guardian has an amazing article titled "Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens." It describes the annual Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas conference, at which surveillance firms share tips on the latest "lawful interception" techniques used to spy on citizens. The companies showed little concern for how this technology can be and is being abused around the world. An excerpt:

Jerry Lucas, the president of the company behind ISS World, TeleStrategies, does not deny surveillance developers that attend his conference supply to repressive regimes. In fact, he is adamant that the manufacturers of surveillance technology, such as Gamma International, SS8 and Hacking Team, should be allowed to sell to whoever they want.

"The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world," he said. "Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that's probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good?"

Would he be comfortable in the knowledge that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing this technology from western companies? "That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country. That's not our business, we're not politicians … we're a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."

The EFF has proposed a two-part "know your customer" framework for surveillance equipment:

Companies selling surveillance technologies to governments need to affirmatively investigate and "know your customer" before and during a sale. We suggest something for human rights similar to what most of these companies are already required to do under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the export regulations for other purposes, and

Companies need to refrain from participating in transactions where their "know your customer" investigations reveal either objective evidence or credible concerns that the technologies provided by the company will be used to facilitate human rights violations.

Click here for further details. One of the broader problems, of course, is that the market for ever-more sophisticated surveillance equipment feeds unaccountable abuses of power not only by authoritarian regimes but also by democratic governments.

As long as engineers and companies claim to have no responsibility for the political context in which their inventions and products are used, the problem is going to grow worse. This problem has been exacerbated in the Internet age, but it has been around a lot longer. In a talk I gave last week at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, I played a video clip from Tom Lehrer's early 1960's song about ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun:

He writes that not only is MSN Spaces filtering politically sensitive key words, but has taken the "even more evil" step of shutting down user blogs, with the justification of "respecting Chinese law." Isaac writes: "This has not happened to other languages on MSN Spaces, and is unlikely to." He then continues: "Chinese users may not be able to get support from our own domestic legal system, but we can refuse to use them and refuse to read them."

I wish to be very specific here:
I am challenging this specific decision regarding Anti's blog. I have
saved the last two posts from the Anti blog here: The second last one urges
Beijing News subscribers to call in and cancel their subscriptions (see here
(in Chinese and translated in English)) and the last one tells current Beijing News workers to
walk out of their jobs as a moral imperative (see here
(in Chinese and translated in English)). Which part of the Code of Conduct is being
violated? And what national law(s) was(were) broken? I would like an
explanation about that decision. I can't see it. If MSN Spaces has
some other ideas, then they ought to tell us so we know where the real redline
is, according to the beliefs of their employees.

I have previously reported two instances of abuse on MSN Spaces sites and they were appropriately dealt with. I thank you. But today I want to complain about a blog that I read every day and which had no abusive conduct. More than 600 people subscribe to it on bloglines and the author is the renowned media person Anti, who was a judge in this year's world blog competition. Why did you shut down his blog? Please give a reason to an ordinary user who has always supported Microsoft and your work. Is there no freedom of speech in China? I await your response, thanks.

Dear Respected User, how are you? We thank you for your letter to the MSN Spaces Technical Support Center concerning abuse. We are sorry, but this Space touched upon political factors and we had to close it down. We are deeply sorry to have caused you any inconvenience. Regards, Cai Lingyan (蔡凌燕),
MSN Spaces Technical Support Center.

Touched upon politics? Which rule of conduct of MSN Spaces did that break? I went through the Code of Conduct and I could not find it. Thanks.

Dear Respected User, how are you? We thank you for your letter to the MSN Spaces Technical Support Center concerning abuse. Concerning your question, we need more time to make additional assessment and study. Although we are unable to give you an exact time about when the problem will be solved, we ask you to trust that we are trying our best to solve that problem. We are sorry that we cannot provide an immediate answer, but we will try our best to solve that problem for you as quickly as possible. Regards, Cai Lingyan (蔡凌燕),
MSN Spaces Technical Support Center.

That is just unacceptable. Maybe the MSN Spaces
workers think that their lives are at risk. But it cannot be more so than
that the life of blogger Anti, who is owed an explanation just which specific
MSN Spaces Code of Conduct he violated or which national law he is alleged to
have broken. More generally, who are these MSN Spaces employees? Why
are they deciding what can or cannot be spoken in China? What are their
qualitifications? What training did they have? What is the basis
from which these decisions are being issued? In the absence of
information, I have zero confidence in them. Please prove that I am wrong
(and it had better be more than your fearing for their lives!).

On the afternoon when Microsoft deleted my space, I did not feel anything at all. A few days ago, I was at Peking University speaking to students and someone asked me whether MSN Spaces would be shut down on account of me. My response was, "When the warning comes, Microsoft will sell me out first. So everybody should feel free to use MSN Spaces." I sensed that the day will be coming. Over the last days, the daily traffic was about 15,000, and then everything was deleted. Damn Great Wall, damn Microsoft. I will make Microsoft pay.

That night, I felt bad and I cried.

It is so hard to be a free Chinese person. This year, my blog was shut down twice because I supported media (Chinese Youth Daily and Beijing News). When I was in Hong Kong, I told the reporters that I know where the bottom line is. The problem is that when my fellow media are in trouble, it is my obligation as a member of the news media to offer support immediately. Under this type of moral obligation, personal bottom lines are irrelevant. One can continue to live meticulously and technically, but one must also have another side that puts everything aside to express true feelings.

In other Chinese censorship news, it appears that the Chinese blog-hosting company Bokee has restored the blog of Wang Yi (Chinese). They shut his blog down at the end of December for posting a petition protesting a police shooting of protesting villagers in Southern China last month. (See a story here about his blog and the incident that came out shortly before he was shut down.) Now he is back up. In his first blog post upon restoration (Chinese), Wang says he hired a lawyer took some kind of legal action which caused Bokee to restore his blog. The details of what happened are not clear.

I wonder what will happen if Anti brings similar legal action to MSN.

UPDATE: A few other reactions from Chinese bloggers: (my bad translations, feel free to correct me in the comments section)

Wang Ning reacts (on an MSN Spaces blog) to the whole situation by saying: "There is a syndrome in Chinese society nowadays (naturally including most big Euro/American companies based in China): aside from material interests, there is no longer any other true or false. Every one of us should reflect on this."

In a letter to Anti, lamenting that she can't read him any more, "Zi Zi" quotes Einstein, who (according to Zi Zi) said something along these lines: there are three kinds of people in the world: the wise, the good and the powerful. If power is not controlled by the wise and the good, the world will not be very good. (I can't find the real quote - but her point is clear.) [Thanks to Wang Ning for the name correction.]

A number ofChinesebloggers are re-producing Anti's posts - along with lots of other information about the events leading up to his takedown - on various MSN Spaces blogs.

There is also an interesting essaymaking the rounds on Chinese blogs. It argues that MSN did the right thing by "sacrificing" Anti, because if it hadn't, the entire MSN Spaces service would be unavailable to all Chinese bloggers, and that would be a greater loss. He says Chinese people should thank MSN for the same reason they should thank the U.S. for not implementing sanctions. Then he goes on to say:

"The disgraceful thing is, its a fact that Chinese people are on a lower rung than other people. It doesnt matter if you are applying for a visa or if you are traveling abroad as a tourist or if you go online. Of all the world's MSN Spaces users, only Chinese users can be shut down, but we still have no choice but to use it. This is kind of like when we go to get American visas, it doesn't matter how much hassle, we still must find some way to get one. Once there was a [Chinese] countryman who had emigrated to Australia. He had gotten an Australian passport primarily not because it was convenient for him to travel, but because he couldn't stand the feeling he got when, going through Chinese customs with a Chinese passport, the Chinese customs officials would eye him so coldly. I realized, the Chinese people are a rung lower than everybody else not because the foreigners look down on us. It's because Chinese people devalue other Chinese people; Chinese people don't treat their own people like humans."

The point of all this being that Chinese people themselves are ultimately responsible for allowing their fellow countrymen to be censored, and that the ultimate solution is going to have to be initiated by the Chinese themselves. The comments thread on this blog where the essay was re-posted is long, with a variety of views about the essay, some agreeing with the initial argument about the necessity of Anti's sacrifice, and others disagreeing. My favorite comment is one that says: "The world is getting flatter but the great wall is getting thicker."

July 21, 2005

Last month I gave an interview to a Newsweek journalist, Traci Carpenter, about the complicity of U.S. technology companies in Chinese internet censorship. Today they finally posted it on their website. Here's how the Q&A begins:

NEWSWEEK: What do you think American companies should do differently with respect to Internet censorship in China?Rebecca
MacKinnon: What I'm sort of calling for, and what people in the human
rights community are saying, is not that the U.S. companies shouldn't
sell technology to China. Everybody agrees that it's great China has an
Internet, and it's great that Western technology is helping to build
that, but we have no business assisting in censorship. It's completely
contrary to our values. And when our president is telling the world
that we believe in democracy and free speech, and our companies then go
and deliberately go and do things that help to stifle that free speech,
then it's not surprising that a lot of people on this planet think
we're hypocrites.

Do you believe allowing U.S. technology to be used this way compromises American efforts to spread democracy?I
think it contributes to a general cynicism towards Americans around the
world, and a general feeling that Americans talk a big game about
democracy and human rights but really only uphold these ideas when it's
expeditious and when it's profitable. And when it's unprofitable to
uphold these ideas, they go out the window very quickly...

After Traci emailed me with the link yesterday I clicked over to see what they'd done. It was bizarre. The introductory paragraph setting up my interview described me as the co-founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers. I am on the CPB's advisory board (which means I respond to Curt Hopkins' emails requesting advice from time to time), but I have nothing to do with its day-to-day operations and am certainly not a co-founder. They also neglected to mention that I worked for CNN in China for nine
years, which is the only reason why I have any credibility talking
about Chinese censorship in the first place. So I asked them to correct the web-only report (which is easy to do) to accurately describe my background as a journalist who worked in China for 9 years and co-founder of Global Voices Online. They did neither of these things. All they did was change "co-founder" to "advisory board member." Lazy. But I know how it goes. I've been on the other side of the interviewee-mangling process. Most of those editors don't really care.

Traci tells me that she gave her editor the accurate background information and that somehow it ended up all confused. Of course nobody bothered to check with me before they published the story.

Newseek's reputation for sloppiness is well deserved. Sure, my little experience may not have policy implications the way some of their other sloppy reporting recently has... but still. It's not nice. And it makes me a lot less inclined to trust Newsweek's reporting in general. Even if their reporters are hard-working, well-intentioned and trying their best, you can count on their editors to mangle the details and have no respect for interviewees - without whom they would have no stories.

Fortunately we're now living in the age of the blog so I don't have to be a silent victim.

UPDATE: I just got a call from Traci's editor, Susanna Schrobsdorff, who is responsible for the mistake. She apologized. Apparently the excuse is that they had listed too many affiliations for me, and had to cut it down, and so somehow the CPB thing, erroneously calling me co-founder, ended up on top. Still, they could have called and checked. But that doesn't seem to be their M.O. when they're on deadline. Susanna said she hoped this issue will not obscure the fact that they've done me a big favor by helping call attention to an issue I care about. Sure, I'm glad they did that, but it's not like I wasn't already getting quite a lot of attention on this issue.

Yesterday I got a phone call from Terry Alberstein, Director of Corporate Affairs, Cisco Systems - Asia Pacific. He wanted to clarify a number of things in response to my recent blog posts. We had a long conversation, some of which was "on background" - which means I agreed not to quote him directly, and some of which he agreed after the fact I could put "on the record." By the end of our discussion, all of his personal perspectives stayed off the record (which are less relevant in the greater scheme of things anyway), while everything he told me about Cisco's policies and activities ended up on the record. So here's what I learned:

Cisco confirms that it does indeed sell networking and telecommunications equipment directly to Public Security and other law enforcement offices all over China.

Alberstein said that Cisco sells to police around the world, and it's not illegal for Cisco to do business with the Chinese police, because the equipment sold is not actually prohibited under the Foreign Relations
Authorization Act. (Indeed, the Act only prohibits equipment like stun guns, handcuffs and helmets, saying nothing about high-tech communications or networking equipment.)

He reiterated that Cisco is doing nothing against U.S. law. Nor does Cisco believe it's doing anything wrong. Quote: "It's not against the law to sell networking equipment to policing agencies in the PRC." [People's Republic of China]

He emphasized that Cisco does not tailor routers for the Chinese market and does not customize them for purposes of political censorship. What the purchaser does with them is their business. Quote: "The products that Cisco sells in China are the same products we sell in the U.S. We do not custom-tailor any product for any export market."

...but yes, they do provide service and training to their customers.

Following up on our conversation Alberstein emailed me a statement with further clarification of what he would like to have on the record. I've attached it to the end of this post. Let me know what you think.

What do I think?

The fact that Cisco clearly has no qualms about doing business with the Chinese Public Security Bureau is odious. We should change the law to make it illegal for companies like Cisco to sell networking and telecommunications equipment to police agencies in countries like China where the practice of law enforcement includes things like beating up little old ladies who demonstrate peacefully for their religious rights in Tiananmen Square, routine torture of people jailed without due process, and ongoing crackdowns against political dissent of all kinds.

Cisco insists that it does not directly assist with censorship or suppression of free speech in any way. Its routers are global-standard, out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all. OK. But I remain skeptical that the service and training which they provide to their customers (including the Chinese Public Security Bureau and other law enforcement organs) has never involved assistance of clients with configurations and functions that would include political censorship or invasive surveillance. I never got a definitive answer that cleared up my skepticism on this point. My skepticism runs especially deep given that Cisco has no qualms about doing business with Chinese law enforcement, and that CEO John Chambers says in public speeches that Cisco aims to become a "Chinese company." I know for a fact that Chinese companies work closely with Chinese law enforcement on whatever Chinese law enforcement wants. So if you're trying to behave like a Chinese company that's naturally what you will do.

Cisco argues that if they don't do this business, their competitors will. And that will be bad for U.S. jobs. Well, as I've said before, at the end of the day either we believe that the ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" mean something, and are worth sacrificing short-term profit so that more people around the world have a chance of benefiting from them, or we don't. Cisco clearly doesn't. This is an insult to the thousands of Americans - public servants, men and women in uniform, journalists and others - who risk their lives daily in far-flung corners of the globe for the sake of these ideals. Such business behavior cheapens and sullies these sacrifices, making Americans look like total hypocrites in the eyes of people around the world. They contribute to the reasons why, as a journalist covering protests from Beijing to Seoul to Peshawar, Pakistan, I had to pretend I was Swedish in order to avoid bodily harm.

June 20, 2005

SHANGHAI, China -- Twenty-eight floors above the traffic-choked streets
of China's most wired city, blogger and tech entrepreneur Isaac Mao
sums up his opinion of Microsoft and its treatment of the Chinese
bloggers with one word. "Evil," says Mao. "Internet users know what's
evil and what's not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese
bloggers."

Ouch.

Hats off to Microsoft's Robert Scoble, by the way, for admitting he was wrong over the weekend. A lesser man would not have had the guts.

June 16, 2005

Some Chinese bloggers have said that they were able to set up Chinese language MSN Spaces blogs using the "forbidden" political words. To clarify the situation I tried to set up my own freedom loving Chinese blog. I went into the MSN Spaces Chinese interface at: http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=zh-cn, and tried to set up a blog titled 我爱言论自由人权和民主, which means "I love freedom of speech, human rights and democracy."

SCREENSHOT DETAIL:

I got the following error message: 您必须输入您的共享空间标题。标题不能包含禁止的语言，例如亵渎的语言。请键入一个不同的标题。Which means: "You must enter a title for your space. The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity. Please type a different title."

SCREENSHOT DETAIL:

I guess Microsoft considers "human rights," "democracy," and "freedom of speech" to be profanity.

This censorship can be circumvented with Bennet Haselton's Freedom Hack Instructions. Using the instructions I was successful in creating the Chinese blog called "I love freedom of speech, democracy, and human rights."

I played around with the freedom & democracy blog I created through the hacking instructions and was able to create posts with politically sensitive headlines like "don't forget June4th 1989" and "Falungong" without trouble:

So the filtering of MSN Spaces China appears limited to the blog's title only. Titles of individual posts and within the body of posts do not appear to be filtered.

February 19, 2005

Attorney Ronald Coleman, general counsel for the Media Bloggers' Association, has written a most excellent letter to the Tulsa World after it threatened blogger Michael Bates for linking to its content and quoting small bits from the newspaper from time to time, in what has become the standard blog manner. My favorite paragraph of the letter:

Your organization's attempt to intimidate a small media competitor and
a critic with the threat of legal action over his free speech is
ironic, but it is unfortunately not unique. The Media Bloggers
Association Legal Defense Project was formed expressly for the purpose
of providing legal advice and counsel, and if necessary to assist in
securing local counsel, for webloggers and others whose freedom of
expression is threatened by established institutions who act as if the
purpose of the First Amendment were to protect a sort of media
monopoly. It is not.